Mayor's Book Club 2024 — Tommy Orange, "Wandering Stars"

The Library Foundation, Austin Public Library and the City of Austin Mayor’s Office have chosen “Wandering Stars” by best-selling author Tommy Orange as the 2024 Mayor’s Book Club selection.

The novel, published earlier this year, is a tender, shattering story of generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope. A citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel “There There,} a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson will introduce Orange who will speak about his work at the Austin Central Library. Pre-signed books will be available for purchase on-site from Black Pearl Books.

The Mayor's Book Club is presented by the Library Foundation in partnership with the City of Austin Mayor's Office and the Austin Public Library.

Said Mayor Watson: “This novel follows one Indigenous family through the generations, beginning in 1864 Colorado and ending 150 years later in 2018. As we meet the characters of each generation, we see how their lives are transformed by the one before, and how they find a ‘kind of love that survives surviving’ in their own family. I look forward to seeing you all at Tommy Orange’s visit to Austin Central Library on October 25th .”

About “Wandering Stars”

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Pr*son castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical Pr*son guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer.

Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in “There There “— warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts — asking what it means to bet the children and grandchildren of massacre.

About Tommy Orange

Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel “There There,” a multigenerational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. “There There” was longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “Wandering Stars” was published in February 2024.

Orange graduated from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.

Host or Publisher The Library Foundation